(Poetry WebSalh0n)

December 26, 2015December 22, 2015

Poetry: THE SOCIAL LIFE OF THINGS —David W. Pritchard

THE SOCIAL LIFE OF THINGS

Red and whorled on my tongue
with chiseled jaw: it’s vanishing,
the social life of things.
It was orange and I ate it
like a viper that explodes
and eats my heart. You can read
about it in a book I wrote, calledThe Social Lifeof Things, a memoir
where I look at windows
stained with dust and dying insects
in the sills; the trees are dying too,
they construct a middle-ground of things
whose social life I’ve eaten
in the aura of a scream
that replicates itself between
my nose and lips and teeth.
An angry mob, a politic,
a thought, a moving bus;
a rearrangement of the thought
but not, this time, written down
while on a bus
(it looks like Pasolini in my dream):
all this traverses social space,
all this has gathered up
the social life of things to weave
it twice around the world
in order to create a new desire.
All this I undertook to devour
when I ate the social life of things
with open mouth and open eyes
that you can’t see, whose color changes
depending on when you freeze.
“Being” I said “resists digestion,”
emblazoned on a face outside the frame
that frames a frame. I ate the social life of things
and this is what I learned: